"You're the madame of a cat house." A kind way for a friend to express her concern that I was on the path of becoming a crazy cat lady.

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Joint Venture

I'm a wee bit tardy in uploading this post. I try to chronicle my finished works in order, so that my progression of a knitter/crocheter moves forward and not in some random order. The following project was finished before the "security blanket." In fact it was the project which lead me to finally finish the security blanket, as I was left feeling much more confident in my crocheting abilities. So the story goes like this....

While visiting my dad on Easter, he mentioned that he found more of my mom's yarn stash in the house. This caught me by surprise as I thought I had found all of it. He left the table and came back with all sorts of treasures. One of which was a beautiful work-in-progress....a baby blanket.

I know that this blanket was not intended for my child-to-be. Mom had only known for 1 month that I was pregnant before she passed away and during that time she was undergoing her chemo/radiation treatment. She generally felt crap and slept a lot, so I'm pretty confident that this blanket was started long before her diagnosis.

As we examined the blanket my dad asked if I could finish it. The body of the blanket did not look too complicated, but my stomach lurched at the site of the edging. I said that I could probably finish the blanket by the time my child was 20.

Then I looked at the blanket again. I noticed that the last stitched row created a natural scalloped pattern. I started mulling over my options and decided that I would try to duplicate the pattern around the other three borders.

Now you have to know that this was quite the daunting task for me as I've never done a border in my life. Straight lines have dominated all of my previous finished works....and that's not saying much since I haven't finished many crocheted projects.

A couple of days later I picked up the blanket and the pattern and decided to charter into unknown territory. I decided to duplicate the last row mom stitched as the border for the other three sides.

I ended up with this...

The stitch itself is identical, but not quite the same. This mattered not to me as I was crocheting my first border!

A couple of hours later, I was done (dang TV watching always gets in the way.) I couldn't have been more proud of myself.

My girly will be the owner of a blanket started by her grandmother and finished by her mom. What a special gift to pass on to her.